Mustered Out on Mertactor

167-1107

Finding Cargo

24

SEP/12

Max is off again early in the morning, determined to have better luck than he had the previous day. Miranda arrives back in the afternoon with some fresh produce that she brought from the market. Grim spends much of the time in the engine room, trying to tweak the engines to see if he can get a fraction more G out of them just in case.

Jie spends the day on the bridge. With Arvor now gone, she’s going to have to take over sensors in addition to astrogation. Grim and Will route the circuits through to her monitor and she spends the day reading the instruction manual. Well, she tries reading the instruction manual, before giving up on it and instead tries the time-tested learning method of pushing each button to see what happens.

Max comes back late in the afternoon:

“I’ve filled the hold,” he reports. “Could be better, could be worse. I wanted a load of hi-tech gear, but everyone wanted stupid prices for it.”

“So I got us 20 tons of piping, 30 tons of kerosene and 6 tons of drugs.”

“Drugs?” Autumn. “After what happened on Egypt – are you mad?”

“Keep you ’air on, girl,” Max replies. “I mean kosher drugs for cholera and diphtheria and shit like that. Like what doctors use.”

“That’s a relief,” Autumn replies.

“They’re delivering at 08.00 so we should be ready to rock and roll by 11.00,” Max finishes.